Satire, Instruction and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain
The Enlightenment Mock Arts
Published on 8. May 2025
Book
Hardback
275 pages
978-1-009-46052-1 (ISBN)
Description
Long before the Industrial Revolution was deplored by the Romantics or documented by the Victorians, eighteenth-century British writers were thinking deeply about the function of literature in an age of invention. They understood the significance of 'how-to' knowledge and mechanical expertise to their contemporaries. Their own framing of this knowledge, however, was invariably satirical, critical, and oblique. While others compiled encyclopaedias and manuals, they wrote 'mock arts'. This satirical sub-genre shaped (among other works) Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Edgeworth's Belinda. Eighteenth-century satirists and poets submitted to a general paradox: the nature of human skilfulness obliged them to write in an indirect and unpractical way about the practical world. As a result, their explorations of mechanical expertise eschewed useable descriptions of the mechanical trades. They wrote instead a long and peculiar line of books that took apart the very idea of an instructional literature: the Enlightenment Mock Arts.
Reviews / Votes
'Bullard has written what will become the how-to of how-to satire in the long eighteenth century. This is a thrilling and instructive read which invites us to think differently about the texts presented here through the lens of the mock arts.' Helen Williams, Associate Professor of English Literature, Northumbria University 'Satire, Instruction and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain is an original, percipient, and admirably wide-ranging approach to its subject: the paradox of eighteenth-century writing about practical skills that seem to defy written description. Bullard's erudite and engaging study explores connections between literary technique, cognition, and haptic epistemologies as ambivalent responses to the Industrial Enlightenment.' Nicholas Seager, Professor of English Literature, Keele UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
557 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-46052-1 (9781009460521)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Paddy Bullard teaches English Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His publications as editor include The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019), and A History of English Georgic Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadie, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.
Content
1. Introduction: enlightenment mock arts and industrial enlightenment; 2. Daedalus and Proteus: satire and useful knowledge in seventeenth-century England; 3. The Scriblerian mock arts: eighteenth-century satires of didacticism; 4. Anthropologies of the mechanical arts: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's travels; 5. Ingenuity, industry, experience: eighteenth-century georgic; 6. Manuals of mock arts: the art of ingeniously tormenting and Tristram Shandy; 7. The art of teaching to invent: Maria Edgeworth and the lunar society.